GCC Farm and Foods students blog about their internships!

ROCK RIDGE RETIREMENT

Fall 2013: Here lay the current garden at the Northampton Rockridge Retirement Community. They have fifteen beds with an array of different community planted and donated herbs and flowers. Most of the beds are vacant, they were once planted with annual vegetable produce. Ian Walton and I are tasked with recreating a low maintence , high production annual and possible perennial vegetable garden to be utilized by the chefs, residents and visitors of the community. We just recently put the garden to bed using, a lasagna composting layering technique where we first took out all dead/ annual/ unwanted plants, dead headed them and cleared them from the bed. Then proceeded to place compost from a local horse farm donated and free! After that we placed cardboard and hay on to beds to provide an insulating layer. The idea behind this layering technique is to boost the organic matter and contain the soil within the beds over winter. This is mid process. Here is what it looks like after all hay is finally dispersed.